Now, many years beyond her official “retirement,” Davis publishes “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname,”
as part of her continuing inquiry into slaveholding and the lives of
slaves in the Dutch colony of Suriname. Her larger project of
reconstructing life in early modern Suriname has required her to learn
new languages and literatures. It has resulted in provocative and
illuminating studies of the ironic situation of Jews who moved to
Suriname to found a radically free place for themselves and who then, of
course, became slaveholders. But the Law and History Review
article pursues a different question, about the various meanings of what
“criminal law” meant in a radically violent slave society.